WASHINGTON: The use of ad-blocking software for mobile devices has nearly doubled in the past year, raising questions about the viability of online media business models, a study showed Tuesday.
Some 419 million people , or 22 per cent of global smartphone users, are blocking ads on their mobile handsets as of March 2016, the study by the consulting firm PageFair with the analytics firm Priori Data found.Mobile ad-blocking grew by 90 per cent globally in 2015, with most of the increase in Asia, the report says.
Almost a third of smartphone users are blocking ads in China, while more than 60 per cent do so in India and Indonesia.
Users are attracted to ad-blocking browsers and applications that block marketing messages, which can be seen as annoying or intrusive. Ads can also slow down connections for mobile users and count for data allowances, which can become costly in some parts of the world .
If ad-blocking becomes widespread, however, it could undercut the Internet's economic model, especially for media organizations struggling to make transitions from print to digital.